On 12th July 1945 there was an historic meeting of the Council of the West Wales Field Society.  It marked the resumption of local nature conservation after the end of the Second World War, and, significantly, launched an important post-War initiative for the coordinated study of wildlife of the Pembrokeshire islands. In particular, the Council resolved to start the new era by carrying out the first comprehensive survey of Skomer Island. By March of the following year the Society had gathered sufficient money, resources and volunteers for the practical realisation of the call of their President, Julian Huxley, to be enterprising and adventurous in taking the Society into a new age of nature conservation.

All of these aims can be related to the lasting influence of Julian Huxley, who in the 1930s could fairly describe ecology as 'the extension of economics to the whole world of life'.  In 1927, he introduced Charles Elton's first major work, 'Animal Ecology' to the scientific world as a tool of great promise for the more effective management of the plant and animal 'industry'. There was a built in bias towards the management ethos in Huxley's thinking.  In this respect, Huxley and H.G.Wells were prophetic voices in their managerial vision of conservation.  This was announced in a 1939 chapter title 'Life Under Control'**.  They had in mind that ecology should be applied toward a controlled environment serving the best interests of 'man's economy'.  With regards his Skomer experiences, Huxley believed that the island had room for science to coexist with that arcadian sense of fellowship found in the work of Gilbert White, Thoreau and Darwin.  It also harks back to the writings of Thomas Huxley. Thomas spoke of recovering a sense of kinship between man and beast, of a moral responsibility to protect the earth from abuse, and of a civilisation so secure in its hold, that it could afford a common ethic of nature.  Today we call this the biocentric conscience, which requires the separation of natural science from natural history. This separation goes further back than Huxley.  It was a germ in the mind of Humbolt who said it was not his purpose to 'reduce all sensible phenomena to a small number of abstract principles alone'.  He points instead to the environmental unity of 'historical composition'.  This led him to produce 'Kosmos' his last great work published between 1845-62.  It encapsulates his whole understanding of nature as an organic whole - a living unity of diverse and interdependent life forms rather than some mechanical structure that could be deduced from first principles.Humbolt recognises the interrelationship and mutal dependence of diverse physical phenomena and the impact these have on all living things. In this context, Kosmos heralds the study of ecology, plant geography, climatology, oceanography and environmentalism. 

It was as followers of that from March to October 1946, between 30 to 50 individuals committed knowledge, time, and scarce resources to this remarkable enterprise, which was carried out under the auspices of the West Wales Field Society.  The results of the initiative gave unprecedented momentum to the Society's efforts to protect a suite of regional nature sites, which eventually  led to the declaration of Skomer Island as a National Nature Reserve in 1959.  Since then the island has been managed by a committee of local people in partnership with the government agency responsible for nature conservation in Wales.

Through Huxley's support of the West Wales Field Society it can be truthfully said that he touched Skomer as a symbol of an historical flow of ideas from his pre- War age of the 'New Ecology', to our modern 'Deep Ecology' associated with humankind's current quest for the lodestone of sustainable development.